Asterix and the Magic Cauldron
Alternative title: Ardok the Barbarian  (Different US release) , "Asterix y el Caldero Magico " -- Spanish Title
Platform: Commodore 64
Gametype: Undefined
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Goscinny and Uderzo’s cartoon characters are from the only Gaullish village in 50BC able to resist the Roman invasion. They can do this due to Getafix the druid’s magic potion, however the cauldron used to make this has been smashed into several pieces. Can brave Asterix and overweight Obelix find the pieces?

In this arcade adventure, it all comes down to you. The fifty screens you must explore take in your home village, a Roman encampment, and the forests in between. You have five pieces of wild boar, and these are used as you become hungry. 

Contact with wild boars or Roman soldiers triggers a one-on-one fight with punches and kicks. Defeating a boar earns you another piece of food, to restore energy once all lives are gone. Some sections are blocked until you collect their keys.

In the US version the character Asterix was replaced by a barbarian and the game's title was changed to Ardok the Barbarian.

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The game is frustrating and convoluted in various other aspects as well. Your boar meter drains at an annoying pace, and searching for boars in addition to the pieces of the cauldron makes your quest twice as long. There's really no good reason to fight Romans as they'll usually kick your ass, so escape is usually a better route to go down. Funnily enough, in order to escape you must slap the Roman at least once first as if Astérix is a little kid who rings the doorbell and runs away hiding in the bushes. The cauldron pieces are not easy to find, either. Today we always have walkthroughs and guides to look up online, but back then all you could do was get a pen and some paper, and draw your own map.

When playing this game as kids, most people never knew where to go after the first few pieces were found because neither the game nor its manual give any hints. At one point you have to willingly surrender and mess around in jail in order to find one of the pieces. Confusing and complicated puzzles like this really don't feel very welcome when each screen takes half a minute to draw. To make matters worse the game features one of the most sinister item placements in video game history. The seventh piece is hidden behind a piece of scenery, so when walking around you cannot see it. This would cause lots of gamers to believe the game was bugged and could not be finished.

This placement of the last piece was so damaging that two different crack groups actually released their own hacked version where they placed the last piece in the middle of the screen in order to make it possible to locate it. It's not like any of this is worth it. Once finished, the game flashes a message saying "BY TOUATIS YOU HAVE DONE IT" outside the gates of Rome. The game then restarts from the beginning seconds later.

The music is quite a piece of work. Composed by Neil Brennan of Way of the Exploding Fist and Bazooka Bill fame, it is hard to describe in words the hilarity of this soundtrack. While not horrible, the main theme is only what I can describe as a sea shanty with death metal drums. There are a few tunes in this game in addition to the swashbuckling headbanger, though most the other songs are only a few seconds long before looping over. All things considered the soundtrack might be the best part of this whole game. Even though the recipe for an Astérix game would obviously be a side scrolling beat-em-up, this game tries to do too much with very little. The size of the game is just too big for technology which can't render a lot more than a few things at a time and the result is that you have to sit to watch the world unfold for longer than you actually play. God might have created the world in 6 days but that doesn't mean I would bother watching the C64 take just as long.

The game was ported over to ZX Spectrum and the Amstrad CPC. There are minor differences to these versions, with the ZX Spectrum having less colors but more detail. There's only five pieces to be found on the Spectrum, but the drawing time is even longer than the C64 version. The Amstrad CPC version has better overall graphics and color schemes but movement is much slower than both the C64 and the Spectrum. Both CPC and Spectrum lack the music that is featured on the C64. Due to Astérix not having as much commercial value in the US, the game was changed into Ardok The Barbarian for its US release. It is essentially the same game but with barbarians looking for seven pieces of a shield.

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/asterix/asterix2.htm
